The Female “Wage Gap” Is A Myth, But Is The Female “Tax Gap” For Real?

The wage gap myth has been around for a long time, but it truly reached the top in 2014, when President Obama said the following in his State of the Union speech:

You know, today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

This statement has been thoroughly debunked by just about every non-progressive outlet in existence, but no one did it better than Maddox did last year. The article is excellent, but his video, embedded below, is even better. Its the single best piece I’ve ever seen taking down the myth, and well worth the 5 minutes it takes to watch it. He starts his argument off with the obvious statement:

Want to save 23% on your company’s wage expenses? Think it’s not possible? Here’s one simple trick you can do to start saving today:

That’s right, just hire women. Women keep parroting the misleading statistic that they only make 77 cents to every dollar a man makes, so why don’t more companies simply replace all—or the majority—of their workforce with women?

Though the “wage gap” has been thoroughly disproven by alternative media, there are some outlets who argue that disproving it does not go far enough to address earnings discrepancies. I was recently introduced to the gender “tax gap” by a Return of Kings article. The article aims to prove that women are the net beneficiaries of taxation, and men are the net losers. An excerpt is below:

When the tax money received by men and women is included in the equation, you can see that for most of women’s lives (except between 44 to 60), they receive more tax money than they supply the state with. Men, on the other hand, give the state more tax money than they receive from 23 to 65 years.

This is where it gets upsetting. As you can see, women’s short period of positive fiscal impact doesn’t come close to counter-balance an already massive overall negative impact. ”The net fiscal incidence on men is approximately zero when accumulated over all ages.” As such, society invests in young males, and they subsequently pay back society’s investment. Women bear massive costs to society, while we are taught to see them as underprivileged.

The article contains a lot of charts and other evidence, and also makes a lot of assumptions, factoring in societal norms and behavior patterns. It is certainly worth a read, and I recommend you check it out. It demonstrates a thesis that I didn’t consider before; that men generally receive far less government benefit than they pay in taxes, and women are the net beneficiaries of such payments.

However, I’m not sure what to make of their argument. While RoK presents a lot of evidence and makes a very convincing case, there is a vast amount of external forces in play to consider here. They include, but are not limited to; higher pay of males, particularly in high-paying executive positions, women taking time off and forgoing earnings to have and raise children, service in the military (who serves, who finances, and who are the beneficiaries), among how many others you could care to add. Some were factored in to their analysis, others were not.

Using gender alone to determine the net beneficiaries and losers of taxation is probably too difficult to do conclusively. Net taxation benefits is an incredibly vast topic and with many factors to consider outside of gender. For instance, where and how do financial circumstances factor in, i.e. with single parents? Perhaps the only area with more external variables to consider is climate science; and though many will continue to push the narrative that the science is “settled” and no one disputes it, the weakness of their proposed solutions and inability to stand behind their own claims leaves me shocked as to how there is such a consensus on carbon emissions being a deadly poison. Though very different, the large number of external variables in both the gender “tax gap” and the effect on carbon emissions on the planet makes a comparison between the two valid. Both arguments can be questioned for any number of reasons, and thus only carry so much merit.

Correct or not, the article does bring its point to light, and in doing so, reaffirms that the gender wage gap myth is indeed a myth. While there is perhaps some merit to their argument that men could indeed be the net losers of taxation, its not something that can be counted on as a certainty. If anything, it should demonstrate to women that the world isn’t all against them, and if they want a better job that pays a higher wage, more often than not the only thing holding their earnings back is the person themselves.